Field
Aspects of the present invention generally relate to an image forming apparatus that communicates with a server via a network, and in particular relates to an image forming apparatus provided with a function of acquiring setting information of a user stored on a server and of customizing settings of the image forming apparatus in accordance with the acquired setting information.
Description of the Related Art
Currently, an image forming apparatus provided with a copy function or a print function is also provided with a function of customizing, for a user who logs in to the image forming apparatus, settings of a display language or settings of a screen to be displayed immediately after the user logs in to the image forming apparatus.
In addition, it is known that setting information of a user is stored on a server connected to a network and is managed collectively so that the setting information can be shared among a plurality of image forming apparatuses. In such management, each image forming apparatus communicates with the server so as to synchronize the setting information stored in each image forming apparatus with setting information on the server.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-87144 discusses a facsimile apparatus that can communicate with a server that manages setting information. This facsimile apparatus, upon acquiring a user identification (ID) from an ID card, acquires setting information of the corresponding user from the server and customizes settings of the facsimile apparatus in accordance with the acquired setting information. In addition, when the setting information is changed while the user is using the facsimile apparatus, the setting information of the facsimile apparatus on the server also needs to be updated, and thus the facsimile apparatus transmits the changed setting information to the server.
There is, however, a case in which setting information of a user acquired from a server cannot be used in an image forming apparatus depending on the image forming apparatus.
For example, it is assumed that setting information of a display language is registered on the server as the setting information of a user, and “French” is registered on the server as a number of the setting information of the display language. Meanwhile, available display languages in the image forming apparatus include only “Japanese” and “English”. In this case, the image forming apparatus acquires “French” as the setting information of the display language from the server when the user logs in to the image forming apparatus. However, even if the image forming apparatus acquires “French” as the setting information, the image forming apparatus does not support French. Therefore, the image forming apparatus is unable to switch the display language to French. Thus, the setting information acquired from the server may be changed to, for example, “Japanese”, which is a default setting.
As described above, if an image forming apparatus that has acquired setting information that cannot be used therein changes the acquired setting information to setting information that can be used therein and transmits the changed setting information to a server, the setting information that a user originally wants to use is also updated on the server, which reduces usability.
For example, when the image forming apparatus, in which only “English” and “Japanese” are available, as described above acquires user setting information of “French”, the setting information of the user on the server is also changed from “French” to “Japanese”. Then, if the user logs in to a different image forming apparatus that supports French, since the number of the setting information managed on the server has been changed from “French” to “Japanese”, the user is unable to operate a screen by using the language setting that the user originally wants to use, which reduces usability.